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The Indiana state Senate on Tuesday approved Republican-backed legislation to require women seeking to end pregnancies through use of the so-called abortion pill to have an ultrasound examination.

If it becomes law, the proposal would make Indiana the ninth state to require an ultrasound prior to an abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Senators voted 33 to 16 to approve the measure, advancing it for consideration by the state House of Representatives, which like the Senate is controlled by a Republican super-majority.

Republican Governor Mike Pence, a former U.S. congressman who strongly opposes abortion and championed federal attempts to cut off funding for abortion provider Planned Parenthood, is expected to sign the bill into law if it reaches his desk.

The bill, as first introduced by Republican state Senator Travis Holdman, would have required two ultrasounds before a woman could obtain a prescription for the abortion pill, officially known as RU486. It was amended to allow the doctor providing the drug to decide if a second exam was needed.

According to Jonathan Dudley's article, "The Real Story of the Religious Right," the Religious Right originated not ex nihilo as organized protest against Roe v. Wade, but was in part triggered by government-imposed desegregation: race not womb birthed concerted political organizing among evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Dudley also notes that the pro-life movement itself ignored theological nuance and stiffled open debate within evangelicals' ranks.

It did involve legitimate moral concerns about abortion, it did occasion serious reflection on the issue by evangelical scholars and pastors, and it did bring a formerly apolitical segment of America into the political process.
But its founding moral outrage stemmed not from Roe v. Wade, but from the prospect of government-imposed desegregation; it rest its intellectual foundation on highly dubious, non-scholarly arguments advanced by Francis Schaeffer; it mobilized lay evangelicals to action by telling them the Bible teaches something it does not actually teach; and it actively suppressed the scholarship of evangelicals who held alternative viewpoints.

The Rev. R. Guy Erwin (ELCA), admits that the stunning news of the Pope's resignation was for a church historian like himself "like the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and Wimbledon rolled into one! (But unfortunately, the best parts are not played in the open.)"

He provides some perspective on the resignation news:

The canon law says "renuntiatio" or to "give up" or "resign" in the one sentence that governs this possibility (Can. 332 sec. 2). It says he can do so, and resignation is valid if he does it freely and publicly, and--here's the old theological question--it doesn't have to be recognized by all to be valid. That is, even if some go on believing that he is still pope, in the canon law he is not.